1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of data backup, and in particular to providing time-based data retirement for de-duplicated archival storage.
2. Background
Enterprises use data backup to protect against data loss. Often, data backup has multiple stages. Data may be backed up to one storage location for a period of time and then archived in another location thereafter. At each stage, computing resources and data storage are used for each backed up item. Backing up and archiving the same data multiple times uses computing resources and data storage and may increase the costs and complexity of data backup operations. Further, indexed-based archive data storage may be infeasible because the archive data storage is often off-line and unsearchable. Thus, locating archived data for deletion at the end of an archive retention period may be a resource-intensive task because locating the data may be difficult. For example, data may be located using a brute force approach of checking each entry in an archive catalogue.